Saint Josse

Saint Josse (traditionally 600–668), to give him the French name by which he is most recognizable, or Saint Judoc in Breton, [Alban Butler, (Michael Walsh, ed.) "Butler's Lives of the Saints" (1991) "s.v." "December 13: St Judoc, or Josse (AD 688)".] was a seventh-century Breton noble [The Breton genealogist Fr. Augustin du Paz, (du Paz, "Histoire généalogique de plusieurs maisons illustres de Bretagne", Paris, 1619) states that Conan I de Rennes, count of Brittany had a son Juthael; Alban Butler, following the twelfth-century "Ecclesiastical History" (iii) of Orderic Vitalis ("Beatus Iudocus Iuthail regis Britonum filius et frater Iudicail regis"), states "Judoc was a son of Juthaël, King of Armorica (Brittany), and brother of that Judicaël who had a cult in the diocese of Quimper", whom Orderic would make king of the "Britons" after his father.] who sought the protection of Aymon, a predecessor of the counts of Ponthieu, to live as a hermit and renounce the crown of Brittany, in a place then either called "Sidraga" or "Schaderias" or "Runiacum" [Butler 1991 gives "Runiacum"] , in the coastal forest near the mouth of the River Canche. He travelled to Rome along the via Francigena, returning safely shortly before his death.

The Abbey of Saint-Josse, beginning as a small monastery on the site of his retreat, was built in the eighth century at the place where Josse's shrine was kept. Saint Josse, never formally canonised, developed a local "cultus". In 903, some monks of the abbey, fleeing the Norman raiders, took refuge in England, bearing his relics. The tradition of the New Minster of Hyde at Winchester (founded 901), was that the relics were translated there, and the date was commemorated annually, 9 January. [Butler 1991.]

From England, the veneration of Saint Josse spread, through the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia, regions where variations of "Josse, Joos, Joost", and the diminutive "Jocelyn", [Chaucer's Wife of Bath swears "by God and by Seint Joce"] etc. became popular names and chapels and churches were dedicated to him. The "mal Saint Josse" was the term for the ills resulting from snakebite, against which the saint's name was invoked by the fifteenth-century French poet Eustache Deschamps in an imprecatory ballade: [S.V. Spilsbury, "The imprecatory ballade: a fifteenth-century poetic genre", "French Studies" 33.4 (1979:385-396). ] "...Du mau saint Leu, de l'esvertin, Du saint Josse et saint Matelin... soit maistre Mahieu confondus!". [Among a host of ills wished upon Master Matthew, Eustache wishes "the ill of Saint Leu, a spell of madness, those of Saint Josse and Saint Matelin..." (Eustache Deschamps, "Oeuvres complètes" DCCCVI ((Paris 1884) vol. 4, p. 321).] According to Alban Butler, the abbey was given by Charlemagne to Alcuin and functioned as a hostel for those crossing the English Channel; it became a centre of pilgrimage, especially popular with Flemish and Germans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

"La vie de Saint Josse" was written in Old French verses by the learned and competent poet and translator Pierre de Beauvais in the thirteenth century. [ Pierre de Beauvais, Nils-Olof Jönsson, tr. "La vie de Saint Germer et la vie de Saint Josse de Pierre de Beauvais: Deux poèmes du XIIIe siècle" (University of Lund) 1997. Jönsson's introductory notes offer good introductions both to Saint Jopsse and Pierre de Bauvais.]

The abbey was closed in 1772, sold and then dismantled in 1789, leaving no traces of the monumental buildings.

Saint Josse has his feast-day on 13 December.

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